How did Mozart die? What we know, explained for kids

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died of an illness on December 5, 1791, in Vienna. He was 35. He had been sick in bed for about two weeks, with a fever and swelling. No one knows for sure what the illness was. He was not poisoned.

The short answer

• Mozart died at home in Vienna, a few weeks before his 36th birthday.
• The city’s death register gave the cause as a fever with a rash.
• Doctors today think an infection is the most likely cause.
• The story that another composer poisoned him is not true.

His last year

Mozart’s last year was a busy one. He wrote two operas, one of them The Magic Flute. He wrote his Clarinet Concerto. He had a new baby son.

In the summer, a stranger came to his door with a request. An unnamed person wished to pay for a Requiem, which is church music for the dead. Mozart took the job. The unnamed person was a count whose wife had died. The count wanted to pass the piece off as his own.

His last illness

In late November, Mozart took to his bed. His hands and feet swelled. He had a fever and pain, and it hurt him to move. His wife, Constanze, and her sister nursed him.

He kept working on the Requiem from his bed for as long as he could. He died in the first hour of December 5.

What do doctors think now?

The register of deaths said “fever and rash.” That describes what people saw. It does not name a disease.

Mozart’s body was never examined, so every answer is a careful guess. More than 100 causes have been put forward.

In 2009, three researchers studied the death records of Vienna for that winter. They found that many more young men than usual died with swelling in those same weeks. They suggested that an infection from a common germ was going around, and that in Mozart it led to kidney failure. The researchers stated that this was a theory and not proof.

In Mozart’s time, there were no medicines that could cure such an infection.

Was Mozart poisoned?

No. After Mozart died, a rumor spread that the composer Antonio Salieri had poisoned him out of envy. There is no evidence for it.

Salieri and Mozart were rivals for the same jobs in Vienna, and they also worked side by side. They once wrote a piece together. After Mozart’s death, Salieri gave music lessons to Mozart’s younger son.

The rumor lasted because it made a good story. A play and a famous film, both called Amadeus, are built on it. They are fiction.

The unfinished Requiem

Mozart finished the opening of the Requiem and sketched much of the rest. Constanze needed the payment, so she asked other composers to complete it. Mozart’s pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr did most of the work.

One part is called the “Lacrimosa.” By tradition, its first eight bars are the last music Mozart wrote down.

Where is he buried?

Mozart was buried in a plain grave at St. Marx Cemetery, outside the old city walls. That was the usual custom in Vienna in 1791 for all but the richest families. Graves were not marked with a stone, and they were reused after some years.

So no one knows the exact spot. A monument in the cemetery marks the area where the grave is thought to be.

How to talk about it with a child

Keep it plain. Mozart got sick, and the doctors of his time could not help him. It was sad, and it was no one’s fault.

Then turn to what he left. In 35 years, he wrote more than 600 pieces. People have played them every day since.

Things to do together

Listen to the last eight bars. Play the “Lacrimosa” from the Requiem. Count the first eight bars in a slow three.

Then play something happy. Follow it with the overture to The Magic Flute, which he wrote in the same year.

How long is 35 years? Draw a line with 35 marks on it. Mark age 5, when he wrote his first pieces, and age 8, when he wrote his first symphony.

Print and play

Print the Mozart fact sheet. Read Mozart for kids for his life and the pieces to play first. For more quick facts, see Mozart facts for kids.

Sources

Checked in November 2026.

• Cox, L. (2009). Strep throat killed Mozart, new theory argues. ABC News.
• Zegers, R. H. C., Weigl, A., and Steptoe, A. (2009). The death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: An epidemiologic perspective. Annals of Internal Medicine, 151(4), 274 to 278.